Activity level: 🌶️🌶️
Modes of transportation: 🚗
After the sound night of sleep, we woke up to disappointing news: the rains flooded all of the caves, so our booked tour to see glow worms was cancelled. Instead, we decided to make our way back up to Auckland the slow way and go see Mt. Nguaruhoe, a.k.a. Mt. Doom from Lord of the Rings.
Before that, we ate at a cute coffee shop right down the road. The food was surprisingly good, and we planned out our day since our plans were all out of wack.
We messed up by not selecting Mt. Doom as part of our GPS trip—we instead just selected the proper route that went by it. And of course, Google auto-switched us to a faster route and we missed it. Classic.
So we decided to double back and make the drive to go see it, even though it was going to add about 2 hours of driving to the trip. It was a little foggy, so we wanted to get closer to see the majesty of the mountain.
By the time we got there, it was almost too foggy to see the mountain. We think we saw a foothill, but it’s not entirely clear which part of the mountain we saw. We almost took one of the paths to get to one of the scenic lookouts, but a hiker coming back told us that it wasn’t accessible due to high water levels. Also, it started snowing, which further reduced visibility. Overall, we sort of just had to convince ourselves that we saw Mt. Doom and head back to Auckland. It was beautiful!
We ate lunch at a cool train-depot restaurant in this sort of post-industrial defunct railway town. The food was excellent, and Sarah was convinced that she heard a banging in the broom closet next to the bathroom—but the sound stopped after lunch so we just moved on. It was probably the wind anyway.
By the time we made it to Auckland, Eric was feeling pretty sick with a head cold, so we took it easy and didn’t eat much of a dinner. Luckily, the hotel room had laundry in-unit so we were able to give our clothes a much-needed wash.
Overall, it was around 7 hours of driving, so we were pretty beat. We did some laundry and basically went straight to sleep early, ready for the early ferry to Waiheke island.
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